… they quickly learned to modify their habits and could be very cooperative and even charming in small numbers…

Ad ogni modo, oggi, non sono più quelli di una volta…

… ruined by creeping civilization and increased contact with the “outside world.”… Latecomers denounce me because the Yanomamö they visit at Salesian or other missions today are not the same kinds of Yanomamö I first…

***

I selvaggi vivono in uno stato di guerra perenne…

… The Yanomamö were one of the last remaining large tribes that were still locked in intervillage warfare, struggling to maintain their independence, security, and safety from the ever-possible unexpected attacks by their Yanomamö neighbors…

NC è stato testimone di questa eterna lotta tutti contro tutti…

… I would be one of the last eyewitnesses to the political, social, and military struggles that repeatedly occurred among the Yanomamö… I also learned about many more wars…

Si tratta di un warfare probabilmente tipico dell’uomo primitivo.

Si tratta di uno stadio di transizione…

… These people were involved in a barely perceptible transition from “primitive” to “complex.”…

… Rousseau never used the phrase “noble savage” (or “the good savage,” as it is sometimes translated) in his best known work, The Social Contract (1762), but the concept he described—that humans in the state of nature were blissful, nonviolent, altruistic, and noncompetitive and that people were generally “nice” to each other—was soon given that name…

Si tratta di un idealismo illusorio…

… One point I emphasize in this book is that our assumptions about the alleged social tranquility of the past may be idealistic and incorrect…

La vita dei nostri antenati era ben diversa…

… Life in the societies of ancient past—the “Stone Age”—appears to have been decidedly uncertain and fraught with danger, mostly from neighboring peoples who seemed to be ever willing to fall upon you when you least expected it—and this possibility was never very long out of your mind…

… For many anthropologists who cling to Rousseau’s view of mankind rather than Hobbes’s, I am a heretic, a misanthrope, and the object of condemnation by politically correct colleagues, especially those who identify themselves as “activists” on behalf of native peoples because I describe the Yanomamö as I found them…

… frequently noted amity and favoritism characteristically found in kinship… In a very real sense, these “kinship behaviors” were in fact reproductive behaviors… Hamilton called his new concept “inclusive fitness,”… generally known as “kin selection”…

… related individuals share genes with each other,… For example, individuals share on average half (50 percent) of their genes with their siblings, they share one-fourth (25 percent) with their half-siblings, an eighth (12.5 percent) with their full cousins, etc….

Esemplare in questo senso l’uscita di J. B. S. Haldane…

… “I’d lay down my life for eight cousins”… That’s because eight cousins would carry, on average, 100 percent of the genes that the person who laid down his life carried…

… It is easy to get along with your neighbors when there are only a few dozen of them in your band or village and most of them are close kin—brothers and sisters, or dependent juveniles like your children, nephews, and nieces…

… Large, politically complex societies emerged only after—or as a consequence of—the replacement of kinship institutions and nepotism by other institutions, by what Hobbes called the power that keeps men in awe, namely, the political state and law…

… larger villages are more secure than smaller… as the group increases in size from, say 40 to 80 people, the role that political leaders (headmen) must play in keeping order increases… tasks become more difficult as village sizes get larger—150 people…

… the presence of potentially hostile neighbors inhibits village fissioning, keeping people at home where disputes and arguments increase, but also helping the village to survive as a group in a political situation…

… When villages get even larger, say 200 people, headmen can become oppressive and tyrannical…. Some of the Yanomamö villages I lived in contained close to 300 people… political leaders in these villages were extremely harsh men…